Microsoft Reveals World of Warcraft Now Runs on DirectX 12 on Windows 7

I really have no idea why Microsoft is promoting this news, yet here we are. A new MSDN blog post was put up today by Jianye Lu, program manager at Microsoft, that talks about how World of Warcraft is a DirectX 12 game running on Windows 7.

There are a lot of things simultaneously incredibly weird and incredibly interesting about this news. It marks the first major title to use DirectX 12 on Windows 7. That's pretty neat. However, DirectX 12 has largely been a Windows 10 exclusive API. It's actually been a pretty big reason behind pushing some people to upgrade to Windows...

More Real Time Ray Tracing Demos from Epic Games and Futuremark

Fresh out of GDC 2018 come a few more tech demos showing off real time ray tracing technologies. These come just a day after Microsoft announced DirectX Raytracing along with support promised from Nvidia and AMD.

First up is a tech demo from Epic Games. It's Star Wars themed and looks stunning, as you would expect. There is a catch, but we'll get to that after the video.
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GDC 2018: Microsoft Announces DirectX Raytracing

Though the adoption of dedicated DirectX 12 games is near non-existent, that hasn't stopped companies like Microsoft from adding in new features and APIs. The latest announcement came today in the form of a new API dedicated to facilitating the creation of real-time ray tracing.

This is a fairly simplified explanation from Wikipedia.

Optical ray tracing describes a method for producing visual images constructed in 3D computer graphics environments, with more photorealism than either ray casting or scanline rendering techniques. It works by tracing a path from an imaginary eye through each pixel in a virtual screen, and calculating the color of the object visible through it.
Scenes in ray tracing are described mathematica

Star Citizen Dropping DirectX 12 in Favor of Vulkan

A posting to the RSI forums states that Star Citizen will drop their planned support for DirectX 12 and will instead focus on Vulkan for their API. This should allow for more operating systems to play the game beyond just Windows 10.

Years ago we stated our intention to support DX12, but since the introduction of Vulkan which has the same feature set and performance advantages this seemed a much more logical rendering API to use as it doesn't force our users to upgrade to Windows 10 and opens the door for a single graphics API that could be used on all Windows 7, 8, 10 & Linux. As a result

Sniper Elite 4 to Support PlayStation 4 Pro and DirectX 12

Rebellion announced today that Sniper Elite 4 will include some nice PlayStation 4 Pro improvements compared to the OG PlayStation 4 version. PC owners won't get shafted here as they also promised to include DirectX 12 support.

SNIPER ELITE 4 FEATURES ON PLAYSTATION 4 PRO INCLUDE:

What advantages will DirectX 12 support bring to the game? That wasn't really revealed. Hopefully it means be...

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Gets the DirectX 12 Bump Today

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided received two updates today. One was just a regular ol' patch for the game. The changes from today's patch can be seen below. In addition, today also marks the date that the game received optional DirectX 12 support. First thing is first, let's get to those general changes.

Rise of the Tomb Raider Updated to Use DirectX 12

One of the first games to get the DirectX 12 upgrade is none other than Rise of the Tomb Raider.

By adding DirectX 12 support to Rise of the Tomb Raider, processors will be able to spread CPU rendering work over all CPU cores, without introducing additional overhead. This will enable users with high-end graphics cards but low-end CPU to run the game at higher frame-rates, graphical settings and other technical enhancements like never before.

This update is available first through today's automatic Steam update for the game. It will come soon to the Windows Store version.
The rub with this update is that you need the la...